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Tag: handmark

TweetCaster is the latest 3rd party app and it comes from Handmark. The app comes after the news of Seesmic discontinuing support for their social media tool and it looks like it has a few features that Twitter users will really appreciate. The app has an interesting UI that’s very different from other Twitter apps we’ve seen. The only strange thing is that when you want to connect your Twitter account, it opens a permission for TweetCaster to publish updates on your behalf. That’s not exactly something we want in a Twitter app but it could just be associated with the beta. Cool features that are not currently in the beta, but they will be included when app goes live in App World in a few weeks include:

“Zip It” feature– Enables user to hide annoying @people, #trends, or any keyword from your timeline. A zipper shows in its place in your timeline, to remind you if you want to unzip.

Share to BlackBerry Messenger – Allowing you to retweet not only to all your Twitter followers, but also just with a few people on BBM. No other Twitter app lets you do this.

Instapaper Support – Sometimes opening links takes too long on your BlackBerry. Saving them to your Instapaper account lets you access them later, at your convenience.

Moving from rivers of monetization to lakes of commerce exchange [click to enlarge]

EDITOR’S NOTE: Terry Hughes, former President of Widality, is Wmode’s as Head of Market Development. Be sure to check out his past editorials too.

The mobile app market is maturing nicely; apps are becoming more sophisticated, routes to market are broader, development times have been greatly reduced, there is a plethora of billing options available, and perhaps most valuable, apps have moved from being the domain of a few niche players to being a critical part of the branding and engagement strategy of most companies. In this sense, the mobile software market has started to resemble the PC software market with a few key platforms to worry about, standardized development tools, and open APIs to enable the many parties in the value chain to connect together.Continue reading ‘The Next Wave in the Mobile App Economy: Distribution, Sophistication, Payments and Identity’

There’s been a lot of buzz recently over the IHS Screen Digest Table: Global Mobile Applications Store Ranking in 2010 and 2009. Though I’m sure you’ve seen it in many articles, I’ve included here for reference.

Most of the buzz related to this chart has revolved around people saying either Apple still dominates, Android has a weaker showing than expected, or look at how much growth Android has had. Very little has been written about the REAL story that chart is showing: BlackBerry App World generates a higher revenue per app than any other store — by a wide margin. Guess you better drop all your iPhone devs and get working on BlackBerry projects right?Well, maybe, but drastic action to statistics is usually a bad idea. Let’s take a closer look at these numbers and I will make the case that BlackBerry gets hosed by the media in terms of coverage (at least positive coverage) for App World and that, while a drop-everything-for-BlackBerry approach is probably not warranted, if you’re still not considering BlackBerry for app development you are seriously hindering your revenue potential for your product.

Handmark let us know that they have launched The New York Daily News app that, like many of the other Handmark apps, puts all the New York Daily content in one place. Personally, I’m a little torn when it comes to apps like this. On the one hand, I enjoy using services like Viigo to amalgamate content rather than have a separate app for each content stream. I find this more efficient and I read too many news sources to have an individual app for each one. On the other hand, if there was one particular source I read more than others, I could see using an app to get more of a newspaper style experience.